Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  5 2nd Lieutenant Evelyn Southwell was also killed on 15 September with the 9th Rifle Brigade. He is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.

  15

  ‘The Abomination of Desolation’

  At the end of 1916 Europe was tired of war; the home front as well as the fighting men. Everyone was feeling the strain. But the decisive break had not come and an increasing number of nations faced another year at arms.

  Henry Dundas’ mind was still on fallen friends and colleagues. As the cold set in one day he went for a wander through the cemetery at Corbie. He took note of the graves of two OEs including Billy Congreve. ‘What a record! VC, DSO, MC … and within an ace of becoming a Brigadier at 25. Incredible!’ Impressed as he was by Billy’s contribution to the war effort, Henry was most drawn to a desolate little patch where a handful of Germans who had died in British hands had been hastily buried. ‘Poor Fritz Kolner of the 2nd Grenadier Regiment. I can pity him almost as much as John MacDonald of the [artillery] who lies a few ft off.’ The fact that he was German did not bother Henry in the slightest. ‘It is impossible to blame the individual for the sins of the nation … Those at the top make [wars] and profit by them, but the rank and file who bear the burden of it all – what do they get? Nothing.’ Pip Blacker was still having nightmares about Treffry and his last mumbled words. His parents too had had about as much as they could stand. With Robin gone and Pip in danger they could not face going home to Vane Tower and had settled in Brittany while the war lasted. ‘This war is not going to end this year,’ Pip assured them at the end of 1916. ‘Next spring or summer we will have more big offensives and more colossal losses. It is useless to hope.’

  Although the Battle of the Somme ended officially in mid November, Douglas Haig wanted pressure sustained on the enemy. For the Allies, as always, the emphasis was on driving the Germans back from the territory they had occupied and over their own borders. Haig still coveted his Flanders offensive, and this was being planned for the summer, but General Nivelle, now commanding the French, had very different ideas. He began planning for a massive push down on the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames in April. For Haig this was happily removed from the usual French determination to ask for more and greater British attacks. However, Nivelle would need the British to take over some of his own trenches to free the men in them for his attack and he wanted a diversionary attack in the British sector. It may have been planned as a diversion, but the Battle of Arras would be a huge undertaking for the British Army.

  The Germans by no means intended to be idle. They dreaded the wasteful attrition that had characterised 1916 on the Western Front. They began putting their heart and soul into developing defensive doctrine, coming up with the idea of a more flexible front line that would not require the sort of manpower to cling desperately to it that had cost them dearly during the past year.

  Richard William Byrd Levett did not have the kind of constitution as a boy that would have convinced anyone at Eton that he was cut out for life as a soldier. Born in 1897, when he went up to Eton it was to join his cousin Jacinth, who was like a brother to him. He arrived in January 1911 but his inability to get involved on the playing fields did not impact on his happiness at school. He was fit enough throughout his time at Eton to involve himself in the OTC and he developed a burgeoning interest in photography, getting special permission to photograph the chapel and other restricted areas. History was a passion too and the Vice Provost gave him leave to rummage about in College Library. ‘Dick’ was ecstatic when he found copies of two letters that Charles I wrote mentioning a distant ancestor, William Levett, a page who had ultimately stood on the scaffold next to the condemned king.

  Dick was yet another Etonian who was at Mytchett Farm in July 1914. He was 17 and contemplated leaving Eton at Christmas although he acknowledged he was on the young side. He had been to a doctor to see whether he was likely to get through a medical but evidently the answer was negative. ‘Everyone’ was departing, so he said and he was dreading 1915 when he would be quite lonely without all his friends. Not having found his way into a regiment Dick went up to Magdalen, Oxford, in March 1915 and found the place bare. There was only one other freshman, an American, and so Dick amused himself with frequent return visits to Eton. As casualty lists mounted he became more and more depressed. ‘In yesterday’s list I knew four killed and one missing … and three killed the day before.’

  He was becoming more and more restless and exploring innovative ways to contribute to the war effort. Perhaps he could find a place in the Army Service Corps? He had also made enquiries about employment in a group that attempted to trace the missing on the battlefields by interviewing wounded men in hospitals. By June 1915 though, none of Dick’s plans had come to fruition and, wearing his Eton OTC uniform, he packed his things and went off to the front to drive cars for the Red Cross in the French sector. After awful delays and endless stops to provide papers, as well as letting every train carrying troops or stores past, Dick finally reached Tours, which was a culture shock for the teenager. His minimal lodgings he could adjust to, but the food was another thing. There was simply too much of it and his welcoming hosts looked at him oddly when he failed to eat more than two meat courses at the same sitting. He ‘very nearly broke down’ when the old man of the house he was billeted in began sucking on a fish head.

  The people of the town seemed to him to be largely apathetic, to have given up all hope of a decisive end to the war. Dick was given a 40-horsepower Napier motorcycle, a beast with a dodgy set of brakes and bad handling. Coming down steep hills he was required to turn off the engine as ‘the only means of controlling the brute’. At one point he nearly ran into a funeral procession and knocked over a tram. When the locals were enraged he simply pretended that he couldn’t speak any French and hurried away. (‘It saves a lot of trouble.’) His OTC uniform attracted plenty of attention. ‘Everyone stares,’ he claimed and the locals would grab him and try to shake the khaki-clad boy’s hand.

  By November a proper uniform had arrived and Dick returned to England and delivered himself to Sandhurst or, as he referred to it, that ‘place of bitter torment’. They were denied fires in the midst of winter and it was so crowded that he slept on the floor. He desperately wanted the King’s Royal Rifles. He was morbidly confident that he would get his wish. ‘Many people must be killed before it is my turn to leave here1.’ He proved to be right.

  By mid December Dick’s turn had come and he found himself on a wretched little ferry that had been plucked from its plodding existence going backwards and forwards across the Irish Sea and pressed into war service. Destined for the 1st Battalion, Dick journeyed via Abbeville in the company of two more OEs and on Christmas Eve 1916 he began his advance towards the lines. Taking a group of strangers, new and returning gunners, under his wing he bought them all cakes on the trip. ‘This certainly hasn’t been an ideal Christmas,’ he wrote sarcastically, ‘ but it is one I shall never forget and I shall laugh about it afterwards.’

  When he arrived the teenager found that he was assuming command of an entire company as their captain had been offed by a prematurely exploding bomb. He was immediately glum about his surroundings. ‘I don’t know if you have ever been in this part of France,’ he told his father as the rain came down in torrents, ‘[but] it is the most desolate, poverty stricken place I have ever been in.’ It got worse, for Dick was also witnessing the most shocking weather of the war so far.

  It began before Christmas with endless rain. One OE general, Hubert Gough, ‘to use a mild colloquialism’ described the onset of winter as ‘beastly’. There was mud everywhere. ‘Mud on boots, clothes, hands, rifles and everything one touched.’ Henry Dundas’ men were suffering just as badly. When the young officers could get around to see them, which wasn’t often, they found that they had simply fashioned holes in the mud and now stood in them whilst the rain came down. Materials could not be brought up so men were pulling waterproof sheets over the trenches and squatting beneath th
em. They got so bogged down doing the tortuous 6½-mile journey to get to the lines that some had to be physically pulled out of the mire. Henry yanked half a dozen out himself. ‘We found one man of the 2nd Battalion – his identity disc showed – buried up to the neck in a shell hole and quite dead.’ There were many more like him. ‘The poor brutes haven’t got a chance of getting properly dry. And my hat! They are fed up. No wonder.’ Henry was fuming. ‘They, the infantry who bear the brunt of the whole thing, get nothing done for them, get paid a pittance compared to anyone else, and then get butchered in droves when the fine weather comes.’ The worst of his anger was reserved for the press at home. He had seen a large photo of a battalion struggling through the mud on the way to some trenches and titled ‘Merry Mud Larks on the Somme’. ‘My God!!’ Henry exclaimed.

  Dick Levett had found himself billeted at the most vile-looking farm one could imagine, sitting under 3ft of manure. The occupants did nothing to enhance his opinion of the place. ‘Three dotty village idiots as farm hands … the farmer and his wife, I think, are dotty too.’ His experience of that awful winter got no better. Dick happened to be sitting in the mess alone one night when an adjutant walked in, seized him and had him seconded to an obscure little outlet up in the lines which was to fit men with gumboots. He made a dignified entrance by falling down the stairs into a previously German dugout and received a gruesome introduction to the trenches. He began heading his letters as having come from ‘The Abomination of Desolation’. It appeared to be the phrase of choice that winter because numerous OEs were using this biblical quote to summarise their experiences. If he needed to find the dugout again, Dick was told, he need only look for the three decomposing Germans outside the entrance. The thought did nothing to cheer him up. He was then redirected to his own hideaway where he and his servant began bailing out the water with a kerosene tin. Together they suspended two stretchers and tried to sleep. ‘Tonight was the worst night I ever remember,’ he wrote down when they had finished. ‘Sleet and rain and freezing.’ Worse, he was within range of the guns for the first time, so he lay there cold, wet and scared of the noise.

  Dick, however, was luckier than most. Once passed out, the German shells had no chance of rousing him. One morning a fellow officer came bursting in and remarked, ‘Well that wasn’t too bad was it!’ It turned out that Dick had slept through the devil of an artillery duel that had gone on all night. One of the offending guns had even been parked outside his own dugout. ‘He doesn’t know what I am like in the mornings,’ Dick commented wryly. It became a standing joke amongst his colleagues, who ragged him mercilessly about his ability to sleep through the war. Woe betide anyone that tried to get him up against his will. One night ‘some wretched officer’, after vigorously shaking him to get him to wake up, demanded that Dick find boots for sixty poor homeless Tommies and somewhere for them to sleep. Dick had neither boots nor accommodation and sat up in bed, ordering the superior officer out of his hole with such force that nobody ever saw or heard from him again. ‘The funny part is that this morning I haven’t any recollection of it at all but that is what they tell me happened. My deep slumbers amuse everyone.’

  The one thing that did get Dick to move were the rats. ‘Enormous things.’ They ripped up his magazines and trampled all over his bed with no shame at all. He and his servant had had an adopted mutt that disappeared and one rat was so large that his servant mistook it for ‘Poz’. He put his hand out and began stroking it in the dark only to get his hand savaged. ‘We couldn’t find the matches and there was an awful scuffle and the bed upset.’ Dick could reach the other end of a trench within seconds when one appeared and was not in the least bit ashamed. He ended up convulsing with laughter after the pests had been chased off. He had a boyish tendency to see the funny side of absolutely everything and he was bemused by the whole affair. ‘A sense of humour saves one here.’

  There was no fraternisation, no merriment at Christmas that year with the Germans. Neither side had the energy or the inclination any more. Dick spent New Year’s Eve at a Divisional Gas School learning about a new type of helmet that was about to be issued. It was not an improvement at all to his mind, with a nose clip and a mouth piece like a baby’s bottle ‘which makes one slobber dreadfully’. A battalion of Highlanders were nearby and they raised hell as midnight approached, marching up and down with bagpipes. ‘I think the whole battalion was drunk.’ Dick himself sat up to see in 1917 in a dirty barn listening to a foreign legionnaire’s yarns, ‘which he invented with the greatest consistency’. He had also come across another OE, a doctor, and they had become quite friendly. Dick had him to thank for some quite embarrassing and unsolicited advice about avoiding a certain brothel which disturbed his naive young mind quite greatly. He and his companions greeted the new year with cheap champagne. ‘Well,’ Dick reflected, ‘I suppose it will be the most important year of our lives that we shall ever have.’

  Shortly afterwards he was moved on again and found himself shouldered with a substantial amount of responsibility for a teenage subaltern. A divisional general had come along and put him in charge of a set of huts that were to be used for resting troops coming out of the lines. They were, in principle, to house a brigade at a time and this would have been challenging enough in itself but when he arrived Dick found that they were in no fit state to be inhabited. They were surrounded by knee-deep mud and he was given 480 men to instal drains, duckboards, even roads to get in and out. This new occupation was thankless from the beginning and Dick found himself the centre of numerous rows which tested his problem solving abilities to the utmost when troops started to arrive. He found that the only thing for it was to stick to the very letter of his instructions; which made him a fair number of enemies amongst the exhausted men traipsing up, but meant that his conscience could rest easy.

  At the turn of the year the rain had stopped, but 1917 brought with it an appalling cold snap, ‘The hardest winter I ever remember,’ Dick claimed. The skies, Pip Blacker wrote, were like pewter. Snow, frost and biting winds combined to make conditions on the Western Front unbearable. It proved tortuous for the men living exposed in the trenches. Birds dropped dead of the cold, ink froze in the pot and rivers iced over. Hubert Gough had never seen more bitter weather in Europe. Stocks of firewood began to run out and men began to suffer the smoky effects of trying to burn damp wood in cramped dugouts and cellars to keep warm. Dick’s fingers were suffering but the risk of frostbite was far worse in the trenches, where, he heard rumours, men’s ears were turning black. The ground hardened so much that shells exploded without penetrating to any depth. Pip watched the fragments spray out at unusually low angles and wounds in the legs became far more common.

  With the hardening of the ground the continuation of the fighting began to creep back into the minds of commanders up and down the front. Training for new campaigns began in earnest. Although Dick Levett remained for the moment with his huts, Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army, including his battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, was to resume harassing the enemy forcefully. Douglas Haig was determined that they would not remain unmolested in the winter months. Gough was to push forward, seizing key positions to make life easier during the forthcoming large-scale offensives. In accordance with this, the Old Etonian wanted to advance his line forward towards a place called Loupart Wood; carrying out a number of minor operations aimed primarily at putting the artillery on a good footing for the spring. Gough managed to press forward bit by bit early in the year and gain a number of advantages as his men attempted to inch across the valley of the Ancre, ejecting the enemy from villages on either side of the river.

  Dick had been told that he was not allowed to return to his battalion as it was proving difficult to replace him. But the 1st King’s Royal Rifles, and his Eton friend, ‘Derrick’ Eley, their gas and intelligence officer, would have to take part in one of Gough’s key attacks to flush the Germans out of the high ground above the village of Miraumont. Taking it would give the British a
n invaluable view of the German artillery positions over towards Serre. With a simultaneous action on the north side of the river led by the Royal Naval Division the enemy should evacuate Miraumont itself resulting in serious strategic consequences as far as the salient they were on was concerned.

  On 10 February they marched off. It was an exceptionally dark night and the going was hard. Unfortunately for the battalion, a rapid thaw had set in the day before the attack. The ground was slippery and men slipped and skidded on the greasy surface.

  Zero hour was 5.45 a.m. on 17 February but it might as well have been a night attack it was so overcast and miserable. The wire in front had not been adequately cut and to add to the battalion’s woes they took fire very heavily on both sides. Fortunately a lot of it went high but in the murk they began to lose direction as the division next door began to veer off track. In their confusion these men had also begun throwing smoke bombs about, all of which made it harder for the King’s Royal Rifles to stay on track. The artillery’s protective barrage was far too thin and moved too fast, for the men were not advancing over frozen ground as expected but thick, sticky mud. The first objective fell to them but confusion was rife. The men had become hopelessly mixed. One company was lost altogether and had every one of its officers killed with almost all of its NCOs. The British were counter-attacked and pushed back.

  By 8 a.m. battalion HQ had become edgy. Baffled company commanders had failed to get information to them because they were clueless themselves. Derrick Eley was sent out to try to find out what had happened and why the attack did not seem to be progressing. He found all manner of troops wandering about and managed to rally them and get them on. Then he went off down the confused ranks trying to place the King’s Royal Rifle Companies.

  The enemy sniped the British troops heavily and sprayed them with machine-gun fire too. The Germans then resorted to a bombing counter-attack to try to drive them back. The battalion aid post was in an open trench and was hit by a shell, killing thirteen including Royal Army Medical Corps personnel. A few of the King’s Royal Rifles made it as far as the trench south of Miraumont as planned but they were far too widely dispersed and, under heavy fire, were compelled to fall back. Posts were pushed out as far as possible and they spent the rest of the day consolidating. They had taken some ground, but had failed to reach their ultimate destination and had suffered horrible casualties.